21st Century Tolkien

[Mister Underhill]

Originally Posted by Lal

But this new industry even includes the enormous associated fame of academics such as Verlyn Flieger, who attracted a huge queue of people wanting her autograph at Tolkien 2005, and Tom Shippey who was indeed listened to with reverential awe as one of the newspapers reported. Books signed by the academics reach high prices on e-bay, never mind books signed by Tolkien himself!

This is probably the thing I like least about modern fandom -- all the critics and the "Tolkien scholars" and the literary and academic acceptance that so many Tolkien fans have craved for so many years. With every twist and turn in the development of the texts traced, every source and inspiration thoroughly analyzed and linked, every Old English allusion and philological inside joke neatly catalogued, every mystery laid bare, Middle-earth sometimes seems to lay there like a roughly dissected corpse.

I have visions of a future in which LotR becomes just another "classic" that kids are forced to read, and for which they'll be taught certain rote interpretations. I liked it better when everybody had their own crackpot theories about and interpretations of Tolkien. They may have been crazy or ill-informed, but they were the readers' interpretations, not the regurgitated views of a handful of scholars.

But maybe I'm just being a nostalgic auld grump. As a Tolkien fan, can you blame me?